Based on numerous studies the utilization rate of private vehicles is very low in a sense that many people travel alone. Typically there are at most two persons in a private car the capacity of which is, however, commonly at least four or five persons, i.e. a driver and three or four passengers, respectively. As a result, the introduced personal ecological impact is unduly high. Carbon emissions by private vehicles form a considerable portion of the carbon footprint of the individuals. Private transportation is also the most significant contributor to the overall carbon emissions and traffic conjunction. With the current rates of growth it is clear that the existing ways of transportation are not globally sustainable. Air quality in large cities is actually becoming a health hazard, whereupon the municipalities are investing more and more in optimizing traffic by employing different methods and technologies. For instance, toll charges may be collected for accessing the city centers by private cars. Many of the contemporary solutions are still clearly sub-optimum and e.g. the aforesaid tolls are commonly regarded as ‘punishments’ for visiting the city center, which is not a good starting point for achieving a sustainable solution.
Instead, public transportation networks usually provide the lowest carbon footprint per person of all transportation forms. The downside is that the development and operation of different elements of public transportation networks is expensive and the scope and resolution thereof will very unlikely be able to completely replace private transportation.
Thereby, sharing private transportation between individuals holds attributes that makes it suitable as a complementary service to the public transportation network. There are some systems that aim to provide service for shared transportation.
Transportation sharing (also know carpooling) solutions help users to arrange transportation (in the case of passengers) and on the other hand, share their private car (in the case of drivers) with other individuals. The motivation behind the adoption of the idea resides in the obvious gas savings achievable and a possibility to split the cost of transportation in addition to ecological benefits in terms of reduced carbon and small particle emissions.
Existing social network services like Facebook, Myspace, and Linkedin may be able to capturea number of aspects of social relationships between different users thereof. Accordingly, some of the existing transport sharing solutions may rely on users' mutual connections via social networks. However, in many scenarios the users that have validly registered a mutual ‘virtual relationship’ via an existing social network still have domicile in different cities or countries and thus, sharing transportation is not applicable even if a sort of a social link or social link chain between the users may seem to exist. On the other hand, the relationships may, despite of their existence, be of nature that qualifies for many things but not necessarily transport sharing.
Few transportation sharing solutions are configured to forward contact information within the userbase so that the users can contact each other to arrange suitable transport sharing scheme.
Notwithstanding the existing solutions, the problems around transport sharing are thereby not completely solved. The available social networking solutions do not seem to capture or at least exhibit those aspects of social relationships that are really meaningful for the purpose of sharing a ride. Managing the social networks in view of transport sharing is not addressed either by the known solutions. Finding or offering rides and planning the associated journeys remain tedious processes.